


Plumes of Smoke

by orphan_account



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Firewatch (Video Game)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe, Conspiracy, Demons, Firewatch au, Ghosts, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mystery, Paranoia, Pining, Rating May Change, Ryan's point of view, Slow Burn, criminal activity, moderate to severe angst, ryan and shane communicate solely via radio
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 21:16:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14089839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ryan needs to escape, and a summer job as a wildfire lookout seems to be the perfect answer. As it turns out, he may have run straight into a nightmare. His only help in the treacherous and vast wilderness comes in the form of a snarky yet mesmerizing voice on the other end of his radio. As the summer wears on and danger begins to surround them both, they must rely on each other to survive.(This AU is based on the indie video game Firewatch. It draws inspiration from the setting and characters, but the plot will deviate majorly from the game. Prior knowledge of the game is not needed.)





	Plumes of Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't been in this fandom very long, but this idea has been eating away at me and I just had to get it out there. Whether or not you've played or watched a playthrough of Firewatch, I think this concept is amazing - two people out in a vast forest with only each other to talk to. Please let me know if you enjoy it!!

As a child, Ryan Bergara had no great love for the wilderness. He hated being forced to hike on uneven trails with his parents through the redwood forests of northern California. In fifth grade, he’d begged his dad to let him quit Boy Scouts once and for all and join marching band. He couldn’t stand being surrounded by flora and fauna that all seemed to want him dead, including bears. Especially bears. Yet, years later, when all the comforts of the civilization he knew were offering him no answers or relief, here he was, running headlong into the entirely foreign, vast woods of the Rockies.

Countless hours on the road had brought Ryan to a faded parking space at a trailhead, somewhere between Yellowstone National Park and Bumfuck, Wyoming. His radio offered nothing but silence, and his phone had lost its signal ages ago. Unable to tolerate sitting in the driver’s seat any longer, he flung open the door and jumped out, stretching so hard he made a series of unflattering noises. Remembering that nobody was around to hear them was, surprisingly, thrilling to him. He took a long, deep breath, and the gentle sharpness of evergreen and dried leaves settled deep in his lungs. For the first time in a while, he found himself smiling-it was hard not to when the sun high overhead was filtering through the layers of leaves and branches ahead of him, dappling the trail that wound past his line of sight with ever-shifting stained glass patterns.

He walked around the sedan and popped the trunk to retrieve his backpack. He’d bought it a couple years back for a trip to Colorado with his friends, and since then it had sat in the back of his hall closet. Now stuffed to the gills with everything he could possibly or impossibly need, he swung it onto his shoulders and tightened the straps. The weight was intimidating, but manageable, and after locking the car, he approached the large sign declaring the start of the trail. It was papered with flyers, sun-faded and wrinkled, reminding hikers that the trail was not suited for the inexperienced, warning of rock slides and caves and bears and every other conceivable way to die in the mountains.  The arrow on the wildfire danger scale was pointed at red, declaring “VERY HIGH - CAMPFIRES RESTRICTED”, a severe reminder of what Ryan was here for in the first place. As he signed his name on the trail log, he noticed a baseball cap adorned with the US Forest Service seal hanging from a weathered post. It seemed clean enough and dry, and he’d lost his hat at a rest stop in Nevada, so he popped it on. There, he thought, now you’re official.

There was nothing stopping him from beginning the daunting ten-mile upward hike besides his own nerves. After briefly glancing back at his car, wondering what would happen if he just got back in the car and headed back to L.A., he let out a long sigh and started to walk, the trees welcoming him in.

  
  


 

Seven years ago, Ryan had met someone. On a particularly scorching evening in West Hollywood, she had tripped on a crack in the sidewalk as he was walking in the opposite direction with his college buddies, and she launched a full cup of sour cherry frozen yogurt directly into his chest.

Her name was Marie, and he sat down with her in front of a bodega to clean her badly scraped knee. In between tears of embarrassment and nervous laughter, Ryan learned she was an adjunct teaching chemistry courses at UCLA, and that she had a dog. She had a front tooth that was just a little crooked, and a cascade of frizzy hair that stuck out every which way. When he told her that sour cherry was an awful flavor, her laughter sounded like a whistling kettle, interspersed with snorts.

He gave her his number. The hot pink stain never came entirely out of his t-shirt.

There was no way for Ryan to know exactly when he fell in love with Marie over the next few months, but each day sent with her seemed to last mere minutes. Three weeks on they were walking her dog, Pickle, on the beach in Santa Monica, and in a blink it had been ten months and he was dropping lilies into a blue vase she’d made in high school and setting it on her coffee table. Marie came along with him sometimes when he was filming for work, and he would join her when she went out with her colleagues after a long week. Her mother loved him, and liked to call him at all hours of the day and night whenever she felt bored to talk his ear off. Pickle slept between them while he told her his favorite ghost stories, face to face to face in bed, whispering like they were kids risking getting caught by their parents. Marie was fairly bad at cooking and her apartment was typically covered with various texts and old notebooks full to the brim with her research. When they eventually realized that Ryan hadn’t slept at his own house in ages, they both packed up and moved to a bigger apartment, central both to UCLA and Ryan’s production company. He graduated and got hired full time. Ten months became three years.

One drunken night, as they celebrated Marie’s new research grant, eating elotes a block away from where they’d met, Ryan asked her if she wanted kids. She fumbled her corn and barely rescued it from the sidewalk.

“Kids?” she asked simply, snorting. “You think we could pull that off?”

“I mean, as well as anyone can really pull it off,” he’d replied. “You tend to be good at whatever you do, so I’m sure being a mom wouldn’t be too different.”

Even in the orange street lamp glow, he could see her blushing. Pickle tugged at her floral skirt and whined.

“We should,” she said, words a bit slurred. “Yeah, let’s have a dumb kid.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure, why not? I’ve always wanted to. And I can’t imagine going down that road with anyone else...y’know, my mom would probably want us to be married, though.”

Ryan kissed her smiling mouth. “We can do that, too.”

They did.

  
  


 

The final moonlit trek up the hill to Aspen Grove lookout tower, only a few hundred feet, had Ryan certain he was going to fucking die. Over ten hours of walking, climbing, wading, and tripping, his knees were more than ready to give out, and once the sun had dipped under the treeline he’d been freezing his ass off. His brief stop for dinner next to a paltry, cautious campfire hadn’t done much to refresh him, and adrenaline alone drove him for the final two hours, hell-bent on getting into a bed and out of the dense woods, where each noise and snapping twig had him going faster, just in case there was an army of hungry bears chasing him. (It could have been; he didn’t risk looking behind him to check.)

Fighting his way to the summit and up the creaky wooden stairs, Ryan stopped in front of the tower door and slid his backpack off with a hard thud. He ran his fingers along the top of the doorframe until he located the key, just as the email had promised, and unlocked the door as quickly as he could, letting it swing open. He dragged the backpack in and made a beeline for the bare mattress in the opposite corner, sinking onto it with a loud groan. “Motherfucker.”

Barely thirty seconds later, as he drowsily observed his quiet little room, angry static punched through the peace, making him yelp and flinch before realizing that it was a radio, sitting on the desk near the door, the handset blinking insistently. The static was quickly interrupted by a voice.

“Come in, Aspen,” it said. It was a man, his voice clear and far too alert for the middle of the night. “I can see you sittin’ in there, pick up and talk to me.”

Ryan was immediately a little miffed by being bossed around, but he shuffled over to the desk and took the walkie-talkie off its base. “Uh, hello.”

“Hey there, new guy, this is Clearwater Point Tower, your neighbor. My name’s Shane. Glad you made it. Are you Ryan?”

“That’s me,” he said, trying and failing to muster the same level of joviality this Shane dude had. “Uh, where are you? You can see me?”

“Yup. My tower’s directly north of yours. Go out and look, I’ll flip my lights.”

Ryan reluctantly trudged back out onto the deck and faced north. Sure enough, across a sea of rolling forest and rocky outcroppings, a light on the side of a mountain was flickering on and off. He could just make out the tower, just like his own, and he waved, remembering that the guy could see him.

“Pretty sweet view,” he commented over the radio.

“And somehow, it never gets old,” Shane replied. “It’s even better when there’s fires.”

“Better? Fires are bad. That’s the whole point of this, right?”

“Fires generally aren’t too bad, unless they go uncontrolled. Our job’s to catch ‘em quick enough so that doesn’t happen. How was the hike?”

“It was...a lot,” Ryan admitted, stepping back inside and turning on the light. “I was never much for hiking.”

A laugh came out in a sharp burst of static. “Okay, I’ve heard a lot of weird shit from people out here, but that has to be up there. You’re out here on the edge of the damn world and you don’t like hiking?!”

“I still do it, and I’m decent at it,” he said defensively. “It just isn’t super interesting.”

“...Uh-huh. In that case, what’s wrong with you?”

“Excuse me?” Who the fuck  _ was _ this guy?

“Anyone who voluntarily leaves whatever life they have behind to spend four months staring at trees has something wrong with them. You don’t need to be a psychologist to figure that out. And you don’t even like hiking, so there must be something extra-super-wrong with you.”

Ryan felt his face grow hot. “Well, what’s wrong with you? There must be something extra-super-wrong with you if you’re always that much of a jackass.”

Immediately he regretted it, but Shane was laughing loudly on the other end.

“Shit, I gotta call the rangers,” he joked, “you just set my tower on fire. Unfortunately you must reach level four before unlocking my tragic backstory.”

“I’ll await that day with bated breath,” Ryan said drily. He unzipped his backpack and pulled out his woven blanket, tossing it on the bed. “Can I go to bed now or are you gonna talk my ear off ‘til I literally pass out?”

“Give it a few weeks and you’ll realize how blessed you are that I’m here to talk your ear off.” He could hear the smile in the disembodied voice. “You have to give me a hint before you go to bed, though.”

“Uhhh...okay, how’s this. I’m a fugitive from justice.”

“The scandal! What did you do?”

“I robbed a bank. Three banks. And I killed a man.”

“Oh, you  _ monster.” _

“Goodnight.”

He set the radio back on its base, smiling despite himself, and turned off the light. He kicked off his boots and shedding as clothes as quickly as he could. Putting on a clean, sweat-free shirt was a small heaven he’d never appreciated before, and as he fell onto the bed, he heard Shane’s voice crackling through one last time. “Sleep tight, Ryan. Welcome to the job.”

His sleep was dreamless for the first night in months.


End file.
